September 11th, 2001

My presence was required at work for a productivity meeting that was taking place an hour before my regular start time. It was supposed to last for three to four hours since the regional guys would be attending, hoping to hear some good news about our district, but I was only supposed to stay in the conference room for the first hour. I wasn’t a manager or even considered “lower-middle-management,” so I didn’t quite understand why I was supposed to be there. I was hopeful that it was the fact that I was known to be upfront, if not downright blunt about situations, because that was my planned route to get some attention shone on the things that weren’t going well in the department.

For that purpose I woke up an hour earlier than usual and hopped in the shower. Soap, rinse, repeat and I’m drying myself off when the wife knocks on the door to tell me that a plane had hit the World Trade Center.

I stopped and thought “How the hell does a plane hit a building in Manhattan?” I finished with the towel and got dressed quickly to go watch the news coverage on the television. I stepped out of the bedroom, through the hallway and into the TV room and started seeing images of a smoking building and emergency services arriving.

Moments later, the second plane hit on live TV.

I turned to the wife who was silent and looking like someone had pressed her “Pause” button. The talking heads on the TV had just finished speculating how many people were in each of the buildings at that time of the morning and with the second plane hit, they were bordering on hysterics because it seems that, like the wife, they couldn’t contemplate what was going on and were just running on instinct; keep talking.

I went to the gun room we had at that house and grabbed an 870, loaded it and set it in the dining room, which was right off the entryway. I then went back and grabbed another 870, loaded it as well, slid it into a zippered case and grabbed an ammo can with a shotshell bandolier in it and set them by the door.

I asked the wife if she had anything she needed to get done at work that day. She responded in the negative, so I told her to call in and stay home. I worked less than ten minutes away at the time and told her that I’d be calling her every hour on the hour for the rest of the day to make sure that everything was OK and to get updates on what was going on. She nodded while staring at the TV.

I then went to the closet to grab the spare flag. We only had a light for the one flag on the front of the house, so every night the second flag went inside. I grabbed the roll of shipping box tape we had bought the week earlier to send off birthday presents to the nieces and nephews who had birthdays in September and October and took the flag out to the truck and taped it up in the rear window of my canopy.

I don’t know why I spent time doing that, it just seemed like the thing to do at the time.

I asked the wife again if she was going to be OK and she said yes. I told her I’d be home as soon as I could and that if she needed anything to call my cell phone. I felt horrible leaving her, but the Operations Manager at the time was a 25 year USMC vet whom I was sure would have my ass for not showing up since he specifically fingered me to be at this meeting. I also thought he would let me go home as soon as possible.

I didn’t remind her of the 870 in the dining room since I thought it would put her in a mindset I knew she didn’t want to be in. She heard me load it and watched me set it there and I knew that was enough.

I made my way to work just like every other morning except that traffic was lighter than usual. It took me until I hit the parking lot at work before I remembered that I was an hour earlier than usual. I got up to the conference room and found that the Operations Manager had moved the TV from his office to the room and had it tuned into the news.

Everyone was asking questions; Do you think this was on purpose? Who would have done this? Who could have done this?

Then the plane hit the Pentagon.

Needless to say, the meeting didn’t even start. Half of the people were driving from over 20 miles away and had decided to stay home. To their credit, all of my drivers arrived on time and even got their trucks fired up and came in for paperwork. It was getting near the end of construction season but we were still busy as hell and each guy was starting with more loads to haul than he could have done in one day. They knew the task and wanted to get in, get it done and get home.

And we hit the road, lowering our heads and trudging through the morning, knocking out the work like madmen. We were coming across a number of closed businesses and open roads and the list of things to do melted away until we were done at 1100 and we all hauled ass home.

When I arrived home, the wife was still glued to the TV, absorbing all the info coming across. She told me about Flight 93 crashing and the various hypotheses of who was behind the acts, basically giving me an update since even if I had a radio at work, we were too busy for me to listen to it.

I noticed that the 870 I had set in the dining room had bee moved to between the couch and loveseat and that she had gone through a half-rack of Cokes in the six hours I was gone.

She got up saying that she was going to fix me some lunch. Fifteen minutes later, I walked into the kitchen and saw her just standing there, leaning against the counter staring at the floor.

Neither of us knew anyone who even lived in NYC, but we both knew something horribly profound had happened that day and that no one in this country would be the same from then on.

My place of employ is nearly three-quarters of a mile west and five miles north of the Seattle/Tacoma airport, basically right under the flight path of their incoming and outgoing aircraft. The house I lived in on September 11th, 2001 was directly horizontal to the King County airport, Boeing Field, and I could look out my front window and down my street and see planes, less than a half mile away, just before they touched down or just as they took off.

In the days after September 11th, four years ago, it was eerily silent at both home and at work.

You get kind of used to noises, you know. You learn to sleep through some pretty loud and annoying sounds when you live and work in that part of Seattle. But I don’t know that the lack of aircraft noise is the reason I didn’t sleep too well for the days following September 11th.